Routledge Film Studies free online: Celebrity and Stardom; European Cinema; Race and Film; and Audience and Spectatorship

Update at 14.33 BST: The PDF files linked to here are currently not working. Will sort out and update as soon as possible. Apologies for any inconvenience.

Cate Blanchett as Galadriel in the The Lord of the Rings film trilogy.

While it is often the emergence of exceptions that proves rules, the very existence of Film Studies For Free shows that there might occasionally be such a thing as a free lunch.

At the same time, this wily blog is certainly no purist when it comes to campaigning for Open Access in scholarly publishing. FSFF's inbuilt pragmatism means that it is always very happy to pass on news of the experiments of otherwise 'closed' or 'subscription only' academic publishers with marketing strategies involving limited free online access to their scholarly publications.

While there is, as yet, no challenger on the horizon to Intellect's extensive championing of the Film Studies freebie, publishing giant Routledge is currently offering up occasional free 'article collections' for particular subjects. Their Film Studies collection is focused on the following four key themes: Celebrity and Stardom; European Cinema; Race and Film; and Audience and Spectatorship.

Free access to the below articles in their current collection will last until December 31, 2010, so do be sure to download them before then.

• Daniel Allington, '“How Come Most People Don't See It?”: Slashing the Lord of the Rings', Social Semiotics, 17: 1, 2007: 43 — 62

• Matthias De Groof, 'Black Film Label: Negritude and Cinema', Third Text, 24: 2, 2010: 249 — 262

• Chris Holmlund, (2010) 'Celebrity, ageing and Jackie Chan: middle-aged Asian in transnational action', Celebrity Studies, 1: 1, 2010: 96 — 112

• Luke McKernan, 'A fury for seeing: Cinema, audience and leisure in London in 1913', Early Popular Visual Culture, 6: 3, 2008: 271 — 280

• Andrew L. Mendelson, 'On the function of the United States paparazzi: mosquito swarm or watchdogs of celebrity image control and power', Visual Studies, 22: 2, 2007: 169 — 183

• Dorota Ostrowska, 'Languages and Identities in the Contemporary European Cinema', Journal of Contemporary European Studies, 15: 1, 2007: 55 — 65

• Stephen Sharot, 'The ‘New Woman’, star personas, and cross-class romance films in 1920s America', Journal of Gender Studies, Vol. 19, No. 1, March 2010, 73–86'

• Darko Štrajn, 'Identity in a notion of the Eastern and Western European cinema', New Review of Film and Television Studies, 6: 1, 2008: 41 — 50

• Keyan G. Tomaselli, 'Class and Ideology: Reflections in South African Cinema', Critical Arts, 1: 1, 1980: 1 — 13